Month: May 2009

By Kate Trgovac

Editor's Note: This "Inside the Marketers' Studio" post, where we ask savvy marketers for their take on the burning marketing questions of the day, is inspired by a panel on comprehensive visibility challenges at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Toronto conference.

I often hear
questions about search and multiple media indexing – how do we show up
in YouTube, does Twitter show up in search results, how can we get our
product images to be indexed, etc. With search engines now indexing
several forms of content, marketers need to understand how to get ALL
of their content indexed.  I asked folks from the leading search
engines to share some insights into this emerging and important aspect
of SEO and answer the following questions:

1. As a result of blended search results, what do you think is the most pressing change that  marketers will have to make?
2. For your particular search engine, what is  the top tip you can offer marketers who want to optimize for your engine?
3. What  are your top 2 or 3 favourite resources/tools/blogs for marketers who want to  be more effective at search marketing?

They've shared their experiences and insights below – we'd be delighted if you shared YOUR answers in the comments!

First, we asked moderator Mark Grehan for the definition of "universal and blended search" that he used to launch the discussion:

Mike Grehan, SES Advisory Board &  Global KDM Officer Acronym Media

Google’s
(and other search engines)  move to blended results is a natural
progression to provide a much richer end user experience. And as Google
changes to provide the most relevant results from a number of sources,
so the search marketing industry must change with it. Now, we see a
move away from the solid bedrock process of SEO to a newer process of
digital asset optimization (DAO). This allows us to provide our clients
with numerous different ways of connecting with their audience via
everything from a pdf document to video as well as other channels such
as news, finance and blog results. It’s more about visibility than it
is about ranking static web pages.

Bill Tighe, Agency Business Development AE, Google Canada

1. As a result of blended search results, what do you think is the most pressing change that marketers will have to make?

With the inclusion of local data, video, images etc it becomes more and
more important to participate in your key search result pages.  Video
search alone is fast becoming a very large part of how users are
searching, and you want to ensure that your video is either uploaded or
created in response to this.  Name and describe your video accurately
with "search" results in mind and upload it to YouTube.  You may or may
not be featured in blended search results but at least you are active
and participating in a medium that is growing very very quickly.  The
same applies to your local data – ensure that you are represented and
have updated the most recent and accurate data of where you are locally
(https://www.google.com/local/add/).  "Images" are harder to
participate in but it is something that many site and business owners
overlook – enrich your site with valuable images that contribute
information and context to your site or business (a picture of your
store front, products, logo etc).

Always a good idea to keep a firm eye on your competitive and most
lucrative search result pages and keep things active, fresh and
relevant.  This has always applied to your text ads but as consumers
evolve and expect more – so does Google (and its algorithm) and so
should you.

1 Comment